How Do You Deal with Crummy Behavior?

I typically like to keep things light with this newsletter, but today’s topic is going to be a bit more straightforward.

The NBA suspended Phoenix Suns and Phoenix Mercury owner Robert Sarver for a year and fined him $10 million.

This punishment came after a 10-month investigation by a third-party law firm found Sarver displayed a pattern of poor behavior. For instance…

He used the “N” word five times, saying he was merely quoting other people who had used it. That doesn’t fly at karaoke, and it shouldn’t fly here.

He was derisive and derogatory toward his staff, particularly women and even more particularly pregnant women.

He berated and criticized his staff, allowing other department heads to do the same.

To me, a $10 million fine would be a severe punishment. It would be like when you land on Park Place in Monopoly and, despite a very sound strategy in racking up the oranges, reds, and railroads, you have to mortgage everything you own before flipping the board over in frustration.

To Sarver, who’s worth about $800 million, this is hardly even a slap on the wrist.

There’s kind of some precedence to this type of situation (as awful as it is to type such a sentence): former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling had to sell his team back in 2014 after a tape recording surfaced of him telling his girlfriend to not invite Black people to the team’s games.

But as David Aldridge notes in this great piece on The Athletic, Sterling had a history of racist behavior that publicly went back at least five years, if not significantly longer.

His eventual selling of the team was a combination of player outrage and a vote among the other owners to dismiss him.

Now we get all kinds of action shots of new owner Steve Ballmer cheering his head off like a kid who’s just been told he gets to stay up late on a Saturday night. Much better.

The report states multiple times that Sarver’s behavior was not “motivated by racial or gender-based animus.” That’s a phrase NBA commissioner Adam Silver also used when explaining why the league couldn’t force Sarver to sell.

And yes, it is a difficult process to make an owner give up control of a team. But this man has owned the team since he was 42 years old.

When a professional athlete tweets offensive song lyrics at 15 years old and then is raked through the coals for it, that’s a different scenario.

Show me one well-adjusted 15-year-old, and I’ll show you a liar. They don’t exist.

This was a grown man acting despicably. There’s player outrage around his behavior — LeBron James tweeted that the league “definitely got this wrong” — but, as is often the case, that outrage will largely fall on deaf ears.

It seems as if the league could be doing more here. The response feels kind of like trying to fill out a form in a doctor’s office and being told they’re not able to process your information because the fax machine is broken.

We’re relying on antiquated methods to solve ever-evolving issues.

Maybe Sarver learns from this and becomes an advocate for equality and social justice. But at some point, you have to think this is just the type of person he is.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll continue to be kind to everyone out there.